U.S. to Negotiate Russian Storage of Atomic Waste

Russian and Iranian workers at a nuclear reactor at Bushehr, Iran.Credit
Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

WASHINGTON, July 8 — The Bush administration said Saturday that it would open formal negotiations with Russia on a long-discussed civilian nuclear agreement that would pave the way for Russia to become one of the world's largest repositories of spent nuclear fuel.

President Vladimir V. Putin has been looking to expand the country's role in the multibillion nuclear power business. The United States has traditionally opposed any such arrangement, in part because of concerns about the safety of Russian nuclear facilities, and because the country has helped Iran build its first major nuclear reactor.

But administration officials said that once Mr. Bush endorsed Mr. Putin's proposal last year for Iran to conduct uranium enrichment inside Russia — rather than in Iran, where the administration fears it would be diverted to weapons — it made little sense to bar ordinary civilian nuclear exchanges with Russia.

In announcing the change of course, the White House made it clear that in return, it expected Mr. Putin's cooperation in what promises to be a tense confrontation with Iran on forcing it to give up the enrichment of uranium. Mr. Bush has charged that the enrichment is intended to feed a secret nuclear weapons program. "We have made clear to Russia that for an agreement on peaceful nuke cooperation to go forward, we will need active cooperation in blocking Iran's attempts to obtain nuclear weapons," said Peter Watkins, a White House spokesman.

So far, Russia has backed the United States in its fundamental demands but balked at the imposition of sanctions or the passage of any United Nations Security Council resolution that Mr. Bush could later use as a justification for military action.

A spokesman for Mr. Putin declined to comment. But Sergei G. Novikov, a spokesman for Russia's Atomic Energy Agency, said in a telephone interview that Russia and the United States had been talking about the subject in recent months.

He added that he did not expect that an agreement would be signed during the Group of 8 summit meeting in St. Petersburg next weekend, but rather that Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin might issue a vaguely worded statement on increased nuclear cooperation, and then instruct their governments to work on an agreement that might lift the current restrictions. The United States has similar deals with a variety of nations, including China.

If such a statement is issued, Mr. Novikov said, negotiations on the details would probably take at least several months. "I would rather not talk about any expectations, so as not to experience any frustration should they not come true," he said.

For Mr. Bush, an accord could help solve two problems: where to send a growing stockpile of waste from nuclear fuel that originated in the United States, and how to keep Russia on board in pressuring Iran to give up its uranium enrichment programs.

Under American law, the United States retains control over nuclear fuel, and nuclear waste, made from uranium that originated in the United States. As a result it has barred South Korea, Taiwan and other states that bought American fuel from transferring it to Russia, which changed its laws several years ago to enter the multibillion dollar business of storing nuclear waste. The proposed agreement does not appear to be intended to allow storage in Russia of waste from reactors in the United States.

But a negotiation would also help provide Mr. Putin with an economic incentive for giving up nuclear aid to Iran, which has long been one of the Bush administration's objectives. On Friday, in Chicago, Mr. Bush alluded to the difficulty in getting Russia and China to join in sanctions against Iran or North Korea.

"You know, some nations are more comfortable with sanctions than other nations, and part of the issue we face in some of these countries is that they've got economic interests," Mr. Bush told reporters.

In two previous trips to St. Petersburg as president, Mr. Bush tried to persuade Mr. Putin to give up a lucrative contract to supply the reactors to Iran's Bushehr nuclear plant. But Russia resisted, and eventually Mr. Bush accepted a deal in which any nuclear fuel Russia sells to Iran would have to be returned to Russia after use, so that plutonium could not be removed from the waste for military use.

Congress would have the right to review any agreement. But since the administration just concluded an accord with India, which requires a more intensive nuclear review, administration officials said they thought Russia would win approval.

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York and a regular administration critic, offered tentative approval of the idea. "While the devil is certainly in the details, given that our greatest danger right now is a nuclear Iran and North Korea, we very much need Russia's help," he said in an e-mail message.

Congressman Edward R. Royce, Republican of California and the chairman of the House Subcommittee on International Terrorism and Nonproliferation, said that he was supportive of the idea but that he expected to hold hearings.

Rep. Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who is the co-chairman of the Bipartisan Task Force on Nonproliferation, harshly criticized Mr. Bush over the move.

"President Bush's foreign policy has become so hollow that his favorite bargaining position is to give everything away. He is repeatedly rewarding bad behavior," he said in a statement.

Outside experts with whom the administration had been consulting on the deal said they had sensed a recent cooling off on the idea as Russia continued to hold out on bringing sanctions against Iran. The idea seemed to pick up again several weeks ago when Russia's top atomic energy official, Sergei V. Kiriyenko, lobbied hard for it during meetings with counterparts in Washington.

At the same time, the administration seemed to come around to thinking that the negotiations for the deal — which could take place over months or even years — could help bring Russia more fully on board with the administration's efforts to rein in Iran, said Robert J. Einhorn, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation in the Clinton administration and briefly in Mr. Bush's.

"They had reached the conclusion that entering the negotiations would provide continuing leverage," Mr. Einhorn said.

The idea is not new, and some outside experts have been calling for just such an arrangement for months. The Council of Foreign Relations did so in a report on United States-Russian relations in March that was highly critical of Mr. Putin's policies.

"The idea was to create a greater foundation for nuclear cooperation with the Russians to support staying on the same track with Iran," said Stephen Sestanovich, a senior fellow at the council and an adviser on Russia for former President Bill Clinton.

But the report also cited such an agreement as a way to foster cooperation on securing spent fuel and providing nuclear energy to nonnuclear nations seeking to develop their own enrichment facilities.

C. J. Chivers contributed reporting from Moscow for this article, and Matthew L. Wald from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. TO NEGOTIATE RUSSIAN STORAGE OF ATOMIC WASTE. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe